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While web logs often are taken to be “Internet diaries,” unlike diaries that are private and serve only the needs of their authors, public blogs serve as a technological tool, allowing for the formation of Internet communities and challenges to institutional and/or cultural narratives.

I analyzed narratives constructed in two years of blog posts for each of five individuals with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). I sought to understand the relationship between personal stories of contested illness and broader illness narratives.

My findings suggest these personal illness stories operate within the artificial confines of the dominant models of a given society. Blogs are used not only as a chronicle of day-to-day happenings, but as a means of engaging with traditional illness narratives, challenging cultural narratives about CFS, and of resisting institutional narratives concerning the illness process.

This study brings voices of people with contested illnesses into the discourse on disability, where their perspectives have historically been poorly represented. The study also suggests that blogs can become sites of resistance and social change by providing a space in which counternarratives can be constructed and circulated.

This chapter examines the survival of private property during the early transition to communism in Romania at the intersection of state policies, ideologies, and legal practices. It focuses on petitions contesting urban housing nationalization in the city of Timişoara between 1950 and 1965. I argue that petitions are partially successful acts of microresistance through law that contested the communist regime's concept of private property, played a role in halting further urban housing nationalization, undermined the regime's attempts at building legitimacy through legality, and challenged ideas about legal instrumentalism in a communist system.

This chapter summarizes the knowledge on sleep and restitution. Sleep constitutes the recuperative process of the central nervous system. The use of the brain during wakefulness will lead to depletion of energy in the cortical areas locally responsible for activity. The level of depletion is monitored and sleep is initiated when critical levels are reached. The attempts to initiate sleep are perceived as sleepiness or fatigue. The ensuing sleep then actively restores brain physiology to normal levels. This also results in restored alertness, memory capacity, and mood. Also, peripheral anabolic processes (secretion of growth hormone and testosterone) are strongly enhanced and catabolic process (secretion of cortisol and catecholamines) are strongly suppressed. In the long run, reduced or impaired sleep leads to metabolic diseases, depression, burnout, and mortality. Stress and irregular hours are among the main causes of disturbed sleep.

Prior research has documented that product failures can be among a firm's worst nightmares. In this research, we examine if retailers are also held accountable by consumers when products that they sold, but did not manufacture, fail. In two studies, we show that consumers not only blame multiple parties when product failures occur – including the retailer – but also that manufacturer brand equity and retailer store image serve as important contextual cues in the blame assignment process. Specifically, building on congruity theory, we show that retailers are especially susceptible to being held responsible for failure if the equity of the failed product and the retailer store image are incongruent. Our findings also indicate that value-oriented retailers are particularly vulnerable to being blamed when high-equity products fail. Our findings suggest measuring attribution of blame between the manufacturer and retailer involved in a product failure event – instead of only the manufacturer as has been the norm in extant research – facilitates our understanding of consumer responses when product failures occur.

The literature on labor-managed firms identifies the source of under-capitalization in the Furubotn–Pejovich effect. Appropriable capital accounts can counteract the horizon problem, but they engender little-examined problems connected with the distribution, reinvestment, and reimbursement of net surpluses. This paper proposes that the introduction of cooperative bonds would provide a better match between the horizons of members and their firms. However, bonds generate risks of their own due to capital variability, thus requiring the imposition of various constraints and the retention of appropriate levels of collective reserves. Finally, a hierarchy of liabilities is proposed to protect parties who undergo information disadvantages.

Casino gambling in the United States has increased significantly in the last 30 years, going from just 2 states (Nevada and New Jersey) in 1988 to 41 states with over 980 casinos. This rapid growth of casino gambling has resulted in additional social costs, including workplace embezzlements committed by problem gamblers. Embezzlements contribute to greater fraud risk for organizations in casino regions and are expected to rise as casinos multiply and increasingly cater to convenience gamblers. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the proximity of casinos as a fraud risk factor for embezzlement. The authors recommend that internal and external auditors for companies located in casino areas assess this fraud risk and where appropriate, perform audit procedures to address this risk. There is also an opportunity for external auditors to assist those companies located in casino regions (that may lack internal auditors) in establishing fraud prevention programs.

What do crime victims want? The answer suggested by Alexandre Dumas’ iconic character Edmund Dantés in The Count of Monte Cristo suggests that victims may want retribution, not revenge. Victims may seek more than restored honor or personal restitution. They may long for justice to prevail as an affirmation that the world still makes sense. Yet, Dumas also reminds us through the novel that human justice is only human and cannot provide this kind of cosmic guarantee. From this perspective, it is revenge, not retribution that looks more measured and more humane.

In recent years, the European Commission and various Member States, citing increasingly integrated markets and higher levels of cross-border activity within the European Union (“E.U.”), have called for the adoption of effective collective redress mechanisms for victims of violations of E.U. law. Although many Member States have already adopted collective action procedures under national law, these procedures have been ineffective in stimulating private enforcement of E.U. law and are often divergent in their approach to consolidating claims. E.U. lawmakers, after a lengthy period of investigation and study, have identified a set of guiding principles for the Member States to use in enacting new collective redress procedures within their national systems. The studies and papers solicited from the public during the Commission’s deliberations are explicit in their rejection of the U.S.-style opt-out class action mechanism. In their effort to avoid similarly calamitous results, European lawmakers propose that Member States adopt “opt-in” class actions, while rejecting many of the economic incentives that some believe lead to filing nonmeritorious claims, such as punitive damages and contingency fee arrangements. The European proposal is unlikely in the authors’ view to stimulate private enforcement of European law or increase victims’ access to compensation, given the flaws inherent in the opt-in class action device. Instead of looking to adopt a “U.S.-lite” approach to victim redress which is fundamentally incompatible with many judicial systems within the E.U., the authors propose that Europeans consider adopting a regulatory administered compensation system, modeled after such U.S. examples as the Securities and Exchange Commission Fair Funds and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The authors also propose that regulatory administered funds can provide more effective and efficient restitution to victims than traditional litigation.