Search results

The global financial crisis of 2008 raises many governance questions regarding the roles and responsibilities of executives and board members. Simultaneously, CEO duality in the USA and elsewhere has come under renewed scrutiny because of the perceived loss of checks and balances and resultant abuse of power. The authors suggest that the financial crisis presents a unique opportunity to explore the effects of, and attitudes, to CEO duality. The purpose of this paper therefore is to investigate whether CEO duality is associated with bank failure and whether bank regulators, as can be expected, are opposed to CEO duality.

The authors investigated the correlation between CEO duality and publicly traded banks in the USA that received Federal bailout funds, using available databases, and investigated bank regulators' attitudes to CEO duality using a series of structured interviews.

No correlation was found between bank failure and CEO duality. However, a strong correlation was found between bank ownership and receipt of Federal bailout funds in that publically owned banks were far more likely to have received bailout funds than banks which were privately owned. Surprisingly, it was also found that Regulators accepted CEO duality for several reasons and have no agenda to limit it.

The results suggest that CEO duality is a less significant issue factor in corporate management than suggested by many previous researchers and policy makers. This has clear implications for governance, regulation and legislation.

This study is the first to investigate the relationship between bank performance and CEO duality. The authors' results suggest that whilst there may be many good reasons for limiting CEO duality, the key measure of adverse effects on corporate performance in this sector is not one of them.

Even the most experienced and hardened negotiators tend to ‘lighten up’ when they step onto foreign soil. Current global conditions, however, allow for a systematic, diligent and professional approach to lease and purchase negotiations. This paper encourages corporate real estate professionals to do the right thing ‐ wherever they may be.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s path-breaking book After Virtue launched him into a place of prominence in social and moral philosophy. Two central, and still relevant, themes are identifiable in the corpus of MacIntyre’s work. First, advanced modernity is in a perilous state because of the philosophical creation of the emotivist self. Second, virtue must be reclaimed if the crisis in moral philosophy is to be addressed and an institutional world worthy of what we are as human beings is to be built. MacIntyre’s heroic effort in this regard is a new presentation of a Thomistic Aristotelianism but he was not naïve about the chances of his project’s success. Emotivism has made it extremely difficult for a virtue perspective to even gain a hearing. MacIntyre proposed a way forward different from abstract theorising. He felt that at this point we could, and had to, learn how to act from accounts of exemplary lives. This chapter presents the wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden as a contribution to aid in the recovery of virtue. The central claim being made is that it is long overdue that John Wooden should take his rightful place in the virtue tradition in ethics. This work gives John Wooden’s conception of leadership that flows from his understanding of virtue the attention it deserves. The examination of John Wooden’s life undertaken bridges virtue theory and leadership. Several other key elements of MacIntyre’s thought set the structure of the inquiry. The chapter begins with a biographical sketch of Wooden’s life because of the stress that MacIntyre places on tradition and narrative unity. The basis of Wooden’s reflection on virtue, the tradition informing his practical reasoning, is a selected canon of Western civilisation, its great literature and the Bible. The Midwestern values of hard work, honesty, faith, and caring for one’s family are also significant. MacIntyre places great emphasis on the need to understand the story of a life and, in particular, the need to understand how development was aided or hindered in childhood and what kind of apprenticeship into a practice was available. The singular influence John Wooden’s father had on his life is documented. The role that John Wooden’s teachers, coaches and mentors played in initiating him into the practice of coaching is reviewed. The experiential base for Wooden’s derivation of his emotionally healthy definition of success and his well thought out conception of the virtues is thus put in place. MacIntyre summarises the teleological structure of human life and the role of virtue in human flourishing by contrasting man-as-he-happens-to-be with man-as-he-should-be-if-he-realised-his-essential-nature. John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success identifies the combination of personal qualities and values, virtues, that fulfil MacIntyre’s second term, that are intrinsic to reaching one’s potential as a person. The 15 qualities Wooden gives – industriousness, enthusiasm, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, self-control, alertness, initiative, intentness, condition, skill, team spirit, poise, confidence, competitive greatness – are defined and illustrated. The rationale for the qualities and for their placement into a coherent whole is discussed. Basic elements of John Wooden’s leadership genius are then brought out. Leaders need to get the culture right, build cohesive teams, and be guided by a moral topline.

The purpose of this paper is to produce a critical history of MP3 technology in an effort to show how its stature as the digital music format of choice had nothing to do with music or associated industries and that its configuration as a product to be bought and sold was unintended.

The approach is reminiscent of Michel Foucault's critical histories, which sought to problematise our current understanding of existing cultural arrangements by unearthing the conditions that made the production of knowledge and their accompanying artefacts possible.

The paper documents how MP3s emerged by outlining the conditions that made its production viable, showing how before MP3s were profiled as commodities to be bought and sold online, the composite of technologies making up the standard MPEG1‐Layer III were objects of knowledge within the fields of electrical engineering and psychoacoustics, and later a process of compression used mainly by audio broadcasting professionals. The paper concludes by examining MPEG1‐Layer III's reconstitution as MP3: its formal configuration and valuation, first as a license for the broadcasting industry to compress sound and then as a “free‐ware” application distributed online.

The paper problematises the taken for granted status of commodities, in this case, MP3s, as digital music to be bought and sold, by revealing how they emerged. At a more parochial level, it produces a competing history of MP3 technology which until now has not been told.

The Interactive Open Learning Centre and Media Archive at the Open University Library is a collection of OU‐produced audio‐visual materials. The archive is being enhanced by the cross‐campus provision of online access to a showcase of locally‐ and externally‐produced multimedia software, and (as part of Carnegie Mellon University's Informedia project) by the creation of a automatically‐indexed collection of digital OU TV broadcasts. The OU plans to create a digital archive not just of its video materials, but also of its copyright photographs and printed course materials, as it works towards the establishment of a hybrid library.

This paper presents the results of a complex but challenging investigation into the global power play at the United Nations (UN) over the issue of international accounting regulation. It specifically attempts to explain why the host developing nations of most transnational corporations (TNCs), despite controlling a significant majority vote at the UN and thus possessing the necessary “political” power, conspicuously failed to impose their accounting disclosure agenda on the TNCs and on the (minority) developed nations. The political concept of power is used in examining the accounting standard setting process at the UN, in the context of regulatory reforms of the TNCs. While alternative models of power are considered, Robert Dahl’s decision‐oriented pluralistic model was adopted in the study because it proved to be the most consistent with the events, objectives and the empirical data presented. The research findings indicate that organized pressures from the TNCs, co‐ordinated under the joint forum of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE), coupled with the economic and diplomatic manoeuvring of the developed market economy nations, had succeeded in overriding the rule of “one‐nation‐one‐vote” and securing a de facto veto over the majority view at the UN. The pioneering efforts of the UN in setting international reporting standards had been curbed and frustrated through the construction and use of such “veto” by the minority representation.

The purpose of this study is to propose to use the economic value added to measure firm performance against information security investments.

The authors develop a conceptual framework to capture non information technology (IT)-related and IT-related security investment factors and propose to study their holistic influences on firm performance.

The authors propose 14 propositions to understand the relationship between security investments and firm performance.

The authors propose a validation process to guide future research to further empirically capture all needed data and analyze the proposed relationships.

Managers can view security investment from a more comprehensive perspective and understand how to potentially contribute each of the non IT-related and IT-related factors to firm performance.

This is one of the early attempts studying information security investment vs firm performance from a comprehensive conceptual angel.

Index by subjects, compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals: Facilities Volumes 8‐17; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐17; Property Management Volumes 8‐17; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐17.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐17; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐17; Property Management Volumes 8‐17; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐17.