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Despite the exponential spread of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, there remained in England a continued indifference to “the Empire”. In 1883, J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, had expressed concern because ‘we think of Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too little’. People had to rethink their understandings of nation and empire, he suggested, and steps had to be taken to modify what he saw as a ‘defective constitution’. Seeley’s lecture series had prompted debate about ‘the imperial question’, but the ‘anomalous political arrangements’ and the reluctance of the people to think imperially persisted. Insularity was not exclusive to the people in Britain, however. Because of their preoccupation with their own local affairs, it was suggested, there had been little opportunity for people from other parts of the empire to devote much time to the larger questions of imperial and common citizenship.

The purpose of this study is to explore the skills required by regulatory agencies for effective governance of public-private partnership (PPP) contracts from the perspective of Malaysian regulators. There is a growing literature indicating that there is poor public sector expertise in managing PPP projects.

The study, being an exploratory one, relied on a questionnaire survey of the Malaysian PPP unit (UKAS) and five Malaysian regulatory agencies responsible for regulating service delivery across a number of sectors.

The results of the exploratory factor analysis returned six factor groupings, indicating that the most important skills are procurement, auditing and forensic accounting, lifecycle costing, sector-specific, negotiation analysis and performance management. It was also found that academic qualifications, profession, years of experience and the regulatory agency had no mediating effect on the rankings.

The findings show that infrastructure regulation training programs should be tailored to reflect regional and country-specific characteristics. This is because a similar study with a globalised set of respondents gave a different result from the current study.

There is a growing trend towards remunicipalisations and contract cancellations globally. This is the very outcome that regulatory agencies were created to prevent. Studies including government reports are increasingly pointing in the direction of poor skills set among public sector staff managing PPPs. This lack of capacity has resulted in poor oversight, which now threatens the sustainability of service provision.

This chapter looks at a new form of a hybrid perpetrator within the field of individualized political violence. We reveal, that the new thing about (transnational) terrorism overcomes current oppositions and contradictions regarding terrorists and persons running amok, which (strategically) leads to an individualization of terrorism and thereby to a hybridization of a terroristic warfare.

By outlining organizational and structural changes in terroristic strategy within the framework of using both modern and antimodern elements, economic thinking, acting global as well as local, and by using network structures, the individualization of terror to the point of hybrid perpetrators is presented.

The new thing about (transnational) terrorism is the evolution of individualized perpetrators, radicalizing themselves without a clear connection to terroristic organizations. This leads to a hybridization of terroristic warfare, and within individualized single perpetrators it can be described as terrok. A terrorist running amok or a gunman on rampage with a radicalized mindset, equipped with his very individual ideology, who carries out his attacks logistically and operatively on his own while accepting his own death constitutes a new strategic way of irritating western society.

Currently, terrorists and persons running amok are separated into sharply distinguished categories. But regarding new tendencies in terroristic attacks committed by single perpetrators, this separation seems to be no longer able to capture the individualization of terrorism and thereby the linked hybridization of a terroristic warfare adequately. But in combining findings from both approaches, the new concept of terrok is able to do so.

While the activities of the Ku Klux Klan are central to accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, and, by extension, closely tied to the development of social movement theory since the 1960's, no previous study has been able to construct an unbiased profile of Klan membership. This paper draws on a set of 94 FBI interviews with Alabama Klansmen in 1963 and 1964 to compile a representative sample of local Klan membership and evaluate the determinants of individual participation. Using this sample, I examine the extent to which Klan adherents differed from the surrounding population, as well as the structure of bias in previous attempts to profile Klan membership. I conclude by highlighting the importance of social networks in linking individuals to reactive social movement organizations, which adds an important relational dimension to existing research focused on grievances produced by macro-level processes.

Drawing on institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Lawrence et al., 2011), this study aims to explore how the concept of value for money (VFM) is understood in terms of the private finance initiative (PFI) implementation in Malaysia.

In-depth interviews with 25 actors involved in the implementation of PFI projects at two public universities in Malaysia were conducted. The interviews focused on the ways in which participants in the projects make sense of VFM in their ongoing involvement with the projects. In addition, a review of publicly available documents was conducted to understand the ways in which the notion of VFM is reflected in the policies and procedures of the government. Data from the interviews and documents were analysed using thematic analysis.

It is found that the advocacy work of macro-level actors, as well as micro-level actors, has promoted PFI implementation to achieve VFM. However, to the micro-level actors, VFM is just a concept that carries different interpretations, depending on how PFI fits their everyday functional discourses. In addition, direct negotiation and lack of commercial appreciation are disruptive not only to the achievement of VFM but also to the public sector reform agenda of the country.

The present study contributes to the discourses on the concept of VFM that is assumed to be inherent in PFI. The findings are based on micro- and macro-level actors and cover both advocacy and disruption of VFM achievement.

Global food supply is developing within a commercial environment with an aim to source ever‐cheaper food, i.e. to move production to the least cost producer. Quality management systems are designed primarily to ensure compliance with third party and retailer standards. Food safety management systems principally control the specific food safety hazards associated with the product and ensure compliance with food safety legislation. This paper, seeks to identify the issues for an organization if their management system is focused primarily on minimizing quality costs rather than producing safe, wholesome food.