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Several academic studies have examined the investment performance of initial public offerings (IPOs). Since the underwriters desire to have the offering sell out quickly, they have an incentive to underprice the securities offering. A number of studies have found that new equity issues are generally underpriced and produce positive abnormal short‐term returns. Like IPOs, spin‐offs are issues which are new to the public capital markets. However, unlike IPOs, spin‐offs do not involve an underwriter which determines the offering price of the security. Spin‐offs are also similar to corporate sell‐offs in that a parent company makes a decision to divest a division or subsidiary; however, in a spin‐off the business unit is not sold for cash or securities. Instead, spin‐offs occur when a parent corporation distributes its entire holdings of stock in a subsidiary on a pro‐rata basis to the parent's shareholders. These transactions have the effect of completing the separation of the assets and liabilities of the parent and the subsidiary. Thus, two separate public corporations with the same proportional equity holdings now exist whereas only one firm existed previously.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

Is the aim of the university to prepare citizens to contribute to civic and social life as well as to travel flexibly and successfully through a rapidly changing work world? Or is the purpose of higher education more narrowly to advance students’ individual economic interests as they understand them? Should we think of students as citizens or consumers? Many analysts argue that, in recent years, the notion that higher education should serve to advance students’ individual economic position has increasingly taken prominence over broader notions of the purpose of American higher education. In this paper, we examine whether and to what extent a shift from considering students-as-citizens to students-as-consumers has occurred in US higher education. We provide a longitudinal analysis of two separate and theoretically distinct discourse communities (Berg, 2003): higher education trustees and leaders of and advocates for liberal arts education. Our data suggest a highly unsettled field in which commercial discourse as measured by the student-as-consumer code has surely entered the US higher education lexicon, but this code is not uncontested and the more traditional citizenship code remains significant and viable.

This Introduction gives a historical and theoretical overview of this volume on Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age, which showcases original research in political sociology of science targeting the changes in scientific and technological policy and practice associated with the rise of neoliberal thought and policies since the 1970s. We argue that an existing family of field theoretic frameworks and empirical field analyses provides a particularly useful set of ideas and approaches for the meso-level understanding of these historical changes in ways that complement as well as challenge other theory traditions in sociology of science, broadly defined. The collected papers exhibit a dual focus on sciences’ interfield relations, connecting science and science policy to political, economic, educational, and other fields and on the institutional logics of scientific fields that pattern expert discourses, practices, and knowledge and shape relations of the scientific field to the rest of the world. By reconceptualizing the central problem for political sociology of science as a problem of field- and inter-field dynamics, and by critically engaging other theory traditions whose assumptions are in some ways undermined by the contemporary history of neoliberalism, we believe these papers collectively chart an important theoretical agenda for future research in the sociology of science.

This paper focuses on the role of myth in group identity maintenance. It begins by looking at the occupational group, but broadens to show how subsociety and the larger society affected the group's identity and actions. Mississippi Delta blues performers’ use of myth serves as the historical example, and this analysis shows how the group reacted to living in a segregated and racist society. Analysis of songs demonstrates how myth can play a role in tying together this subordinated group in society and perpetuate myth. How the blues subculture still employs these myths today is also addressed.

Field theory is waxing in the sociology of science, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work is especially influential. His characterization of field structure and dynamics has been especially valuable in drawing attention to hierarchical and center-periphery relations in science and technology, and to the stability and reproduction of science and technology practices. What field theory does less well, however, is to capture the existence of multiple (including marginal) logics around a given sociotechnical object. Nor does it capture the dynamics of a specific logic of neoliberal capitalism in the US: the cultural and economic value of entrepreneurship that emphasizes the continual reconfiguration of social relations, which has its roots in a longer US history of progress-through-reinvention, and is abetted by new technologies designed to continually “update” and remix. Much better at capturing these qualities, we argue, is an institutionalist theory in which dynamism, not stasis, is foregrounded, and there is room for multiple, contradictory, and non-cognitive logics to co-exist. Using the expansion of “alternative nutrition” in the US, we show that its formation took place via the conjunction of parallel streams of social action that encompassed diverse logics and encouraged creativity and hybridity. More generally, variability in field stability and qualities, not static fields, deserve analytic attention.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

An inquiry into the constitution of the experience of patienthood. It understands “becoming a patient” as a production of a subjectivity, in other words as a process of individuation and milieu that occurs through an ontology of production. This ontology of production can, of course, also be understood as a political ontology. Therefore, this is, first of all, an inquiry into a mode of production, and, secondly, an inquiry into its relation to the issue of social justice – because of effects of digital divisions. In these terms, it also reflects on how expert discourses, such as in medical sociology and science studies (STS), can (and do) articulate their problems.

An integrative mode of discourse analysis, strongly related to discursive institutionalism, called semantic agency theory: it considers those arrangements (institutions, informal organizations, networks, collectivities, etc.) and assemblages (intellectual equipment, vernacular epistemologies, etc.) that are constitutive of how the issue of “patient experience” can be articulated form its position within an ontology of production.

The aim not being the production of a finite result, what is needed is a shift in how “the construction of patient experience” is produced by expert discourses. While the inquiry is not primarily an empirical study and is also limited to “Western societies,” it emphasizes that there is a relation between political ontologies (including the issues of social justice) and the subjectivities that shape the experiences of people in contemporary health care systems, and, finally, that this relation is troubled by the effects of the digital divide(s).

A proposal “to interrogate and trouble” some innovative extensions and revisions – even though it will not be able to speculate about matters of degree – to contemporary theories of biomedicalization, patienthood, and managed care.

This paper aims to trace the emergence, rise and eventual fall of Mojo-MDA. Established as a creative consultancy in 1975, Mojo embarked on an ambitious growth strategy that would see it emerge as Australia’s first multinational agency. By examining the agency’s trajectory over the 1970s and 1980s, this paper revisits the story of an Australian agency with boundless confidence to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic role played by corporate culture in the agency's fortunes.

This study uses reports and features published in the Australian advertising trade press, along with other first-hand accounts, including oral history interviews and personal correspondence with former agency staff.

By identifying the forces and influences affecting Mojo-MDA’s outlook and operations, this paper demonstrates the important yet paradoxical role that corporate culture plays in both building and undermining an agency’s ambitions and the need for marketing historians to pay closer attention to it.

This examination of an agency’s inner machinations over an extended period presents a unique perspective of the ways that advertising agencies operate, as well as the forces that drive and impede them, at both national and global levels. The Mojo-MDA story also illustrates the need for marketing and business historians to pay close attention to corporate culture and the different ways that it affects marketing business and practices.

Without short-sales constraints, mean-variance (MV) and power-utility portfolios generated from historical data are often characterized by extreme expected returns, standard deviations, and weights. The result is usually attributed to estimation error. I argue that modeling error, that is, modeling the portfolio problem with just a budget constraint, plays a more fundamental role in determining the extreme solutions and that a more complete analysis of MV problems should include realistic constraints, estimates of the means based on predictive variables, and specific values of investors’ risk tolerances. Empirical evidence shows that investors who utilize MV analysis without imposing short-sales constraints, without employing estimates of the means based on predictive variables, and without specifying their risk tolerance miss out on remarkably remunerative investment opportunities.