Search results

To analyze the settled order of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against TokenLot LLC (TokenLot), which was the SEC’s first action charging a seller of digital tokens as an unregistered broker-dealer.

Analyzes the SEC’s order within the context of other recent actions by the SEC on cryptocurrencies and digital tokens and discusses future implications of the order in this area.

The SEC’s order against TokenLot as an unregistered broker-dealer was a logical next step in its enforcement activity in the cryptocurrency and digital token space.The order demonstrates that the SEC expects firms in the cryptocurrency space to use the well-established constructs of federal securities laws to evaluate their business activities to ensure those activities are legally compliant.

Practical guidance from experienced securities and financial services lawyers analyzing recent developments in a nascent area of SEC enforcement.

WHEN The Crock of Gold was first published in London in 1912, this extraordinary prose‐fantasy, described by a reviewer in The Times as ‘an inspired medley of topsy‐turvydom’, was hailed as a veritable masterpiece from the hands of a new poet of the same school with Yeats and Synge. That poet was, of course, James Stephens, the poet whom Sean O'Casey would later refer to as ‘the jesting poet with a radiant star in's coxcomb’, and to whom he dedicated, in 1949, his favourite play, Cock‐a‐Doodle Dandy. The reviewer in Punch at the time likened The Crock of Gold to ‘a fairy fantasy, elvish, grotesque, realistic, allegorical, humorous, satirical, idealistic, and poetical by turns … and very beautiful’.

Defining and describing research methodologies is difficult. Methodologies have similarities and resonances, and overlapping characteristics. Familiar labels of case study, action research and ethnography may not be adequate to describe new and creative approaches to qualitative research. If we simply transfer old ways to new contexts, we risk limiting our understanding of the complexities of real life settings. The call to set aside old dualisms and devise new methodological approaches has been sounded. Accordingly, this article sets out to describe a fledgling new methodological approach, and how it was operationalized in a small‐scale study of digitally‐mediated classroom learning.

The methodology combines elements of action research and case study with an ethnographic approach. It was devised for a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a sixth form college in north‐west England. Its flexibility and attention to detail enabled multiple data collection methods. This range of methods enabled meticulous analysis of many of the group's online and offline interactions with each other and with Facebook as they co‐constructed their group Facebook page.

Reflexively combining elements of case study, action research and ethnography thus helped capture the “connected complexities” (Davies) of this contemporary classroom setting. This is necessary if researchers are to obtain any meaningful understanding of how learning happens in such contexts.

The author hopes to contribute to the discourse on qualitative methodology and invites other researchers studying similar contexts to consider a similar approach.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

I am trying to reason how cultural entrepreneurship research still could become more cultural, by developing two ideas: (1) that cultural entrepreneurship research describes the scholarly effort to inquire into how concepts, plans, recipes, rules, and instructions govern and are battled in the emergence of the organization-creation process. (2) Second, that this reveals a great affinity between the cultural and the entrepreneurial and that a more literary approach to writing cultural entrepreneurship research holds promise of a more nuanced, imaginative, and thus more cultural entrepreneurship research. In effect, the entrepreneurial process would, culturally understood, be the successful struggle to move beyond the comfortable place of dominant normality (and its assuring roles and templates) into an “un-insured” temporary space of potentialities, attractive to the imaginative mind for its motivating intimacy with hitherto undisclosed value. Most of this comes from re-reading Clifford Geertz’s (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures using Stephen Greenblatt’s (1997) The Touch of the Real as a companion. It brings me to the conclusion that we have never quite been Geertzian, and at least not Geertzian enough.

The purpose of this paper is to study consumer engagement as a dynamic, iterative process in the context of TV shows. A theoretical framework involving the central constructs of brand actions, customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), and consumption is proposed. Brand actions of TV shows include advertising and firm-generated content (FGC) on social media. CEBs include volume, sentiment, and richness of user-generated content (UGC) on social media. Consumption comprises live and time-shifted TV viewing.

The authors study 31 new TV shows introduced in 2015. Consistent with the ecosystem framework, a simultaneous system of equations approach is adopted to analyze data from a US Cable TV provider, Kantar Media, and Twitter.

The findings show that advertising efforts initiated by the TV show have a positive effect on time-shifted viewing, but a negative effect on live viewing; tweets posted by the TV show (FGC) have a negative effect on time-shifted viewing, but no effect on live viewing; and negative sentiment from tweets posted by viewers (UGC) reduces time-shifted viewing, but increases live viewing.

Content creators and TV networks are faced with the daunting challenge of retaining their audiences in a media-fragmented world. Whereas most studies on engagement have focused on static firm-customer relationships, this study examines engagement from a dynamic, multi-agent perspective by studying interrelationships among brand actions, CEBs, and consumption over time. Accordingly, this study can help brands to quantify the effectiveness of their engagement efforts in terms of encouraging CEBs and eliciting specific TV consumption behaviors.

Simon Cowell, the impresario behind The X Factor, a popular television talent show, has often been compared to P.T. Barnum, the legendary nineteenth century showman. This paper aims to examine the alleged parallels in detail and attempts to assess this “Barnum reborn” argument.

Putative parallels between the impresarios are considered under the aegis of two long‐standing, if contentious, historical “theories”: time's cycle and the great man thesis.

Seven broad similarities between the showmen are identified: vulgarity, hyperbole, rivalry, publicity, duplicity, liminality and history. In each case, the arguments pro and con are explored, as is humanity's propensity to personify.

In accordance with the iconic literary critic Harold Bloom, who “strikes texts together to seek if they spark”, this paper strikes two celebrated showmen together to generate historical sparks.

Despite research spanning a 20‐year period (from 1950 to 1970), Ray L. Birdwhistell’s work on body language and theory of kinesics has been recorded only in occasional papers. Birdwhistell defined kinesics as “the study of body‐motion as related to the non‐verbal aspects of interpersonal communication”. He believed body‐motion communication to be systemic, a socially learned and communicative behaviour unless proven otherwise. The article extensively collates and analyses Birdwhistell’s work and theories. Birdwhistell was frequently forced to admit that a number of his theories were subject to some dispute. The article concludes that Birdwhistell’s work contains major flaws and the verdict of other researchers who have tried to develop his theories of kinesics has been damning.