Search results

The global financial crisis has magnified the role of Financial Sector Surveillance (FSS) in the International Monetary Fund's activities. This chapter surveys the various steps and initiatives through which the Fund has increasingly deepened its involvement in FSS. Overall, this process can be characterised by a preliminary stage and two main phases. The preliminary stage dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s, and was mainly related to the Fund's research and technical assistance activities within the process of monetary and financial deregulation embraced by several member countries. The first ‘official’ phase of the Fund's involvement in FSS started in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis, and relates to the international call to include financial sector issues among the core areas of Fund surveillance. The second phase focuses on the objectives of bringing the coverage of financial sector issues ‘up-to-par’ with the coverage of other traditional core areas of surveillance, and of integrating financial analysis into the Fund's analytical macroeconomic framework. By urging the Fund to give greater attention to its member countries' financial systems, the international community's response to the global crisis may mark the beginning of a new phase of FSS. The Fund's financial sector surveillance, particularly on advanced economies, is of paramount importance for emerging market and developing countries, as they are vulnerable to spillover effects from crises originated in advanced economies. Emerging market and developing economies, which constitute the majority of the Fund's 187 members, are currently the recipients of over 50 programmes of financial support from the Fund (including those of a precautionary nature), totalling over $250 billion.

Empirical research demonstrates that category specialism is aligned with competitive success and that social actors indulging in perceptual violations of social codes are subjected to devaluations. Through category generalism, however, social actors may obtain access to diverse set of audience segments. This chapter investigates such a trade-off in the context of political ideologies – conceived here as composed of social codes and exposed to a discipline similar to that of market categories. A successful instance of repositioned identity is introduced and discussed: the case of the British Liberal Democrats Party during the post-WWII period. Particular attention is dedicated to the process of recombination of own and oppositional social codes. This strategy contributed to increase the audience attention received on each of the issues traditionally “owned” by the Liberal Democrats Party. Party level analyses suggest that the borrowed issues improved audience attention when they contributed to extend and clarify the ideological roots of the Liberal Party. The implications of this case study for current research on market categories are further discussed.

The upper-echelons model of Hambrick and Mason ((1984). Academy of Management Review, 9, 193–206) launched a new area of research and provided the first overall theoretical framework for use in understanding how the experiences, backgrounds, and values of senior executives in organizations can influence the decisions that they make. The model is typically assumed to be what Rousseau ((1985). In: B. M. Staw, & L. L. Cumming (Eds), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 7, pp. 1–37). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press) calls “multi-level,” as it describes how both individuals and top management teams (TMTs) make decisions in line with their preferences, biases, and values; the same model is applicable to both individuals and groups. However, the levels issues in the model have never been subjected to rigorous analysis. This chapter juxtaposes levels concepts and theories on the upper-echelons model, in an effort to highlight its strengths as well as its weaknesses. While the majority of researchers use the model to describe team-level decision making, the analysis presented here reveals that the model is inherently individual-level in focus, and several important limitations must be overcome before the model will provide a full explanation of team-level decision making.

Drawing on the moral foundations theory (MFT), we examine what nonprofit organizations (NPOs) discuss and how NPOs engage in gun-related issues on Twitter. Specifically, we explore latent topics and embedded moral values (i.e. care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) in NPOs’ tweets and investigate the effects of the latent topics and moral values on invoking public engagement.

Data were retrieved by the Twint Python and the rtweet R packages. Finally, 5,041 tweets posted by 679 NPOs were analyzed via unsupervised topic modeling and the extended moral foundations dictionary (eMFD). Negative binomial regression analysis was employed for statistical analysis.

NPOs’ engagement in gun-related issues mainly focuses on laws and policies, calling for action and collaborations, and school safety. All five moral foundations are more salient in the cluster of laws and policies. When NPOs discuss the above-mentioned three topics, the public is less likely to like or retweet NPOs’ messages. In contrast, NPOs’ messages with the sanctity foundation are most likely to receive likes and retweets from the public. The fairness foundation interacts with Cluster 3 of school safety on the number of likes.

This study enhances the understanding of gun-related social media discussions by identifying the crucial involvement of NPOs as major stakeholders. In addition, our study enriches the existing literature on NPOs’ social media communication by including moral values and their moral-emotional effects on public engagement. Finally, our study validates the eMFD dictionary and broadens its applicability to gun-related topics.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

Is the sharing economy a field? Answering this question is crucial to understanding how sharing organizations look and behave, as well as how the sharing economy might develop. In this chapter, the authors applied two different field conceptions – organizational field and issue field – as a starting point for an explorative empirical analysis. To capture both field concepts, the authors collected relational data and data on organizations’ self-representations to see how organizations engaged in the debate on the sharing economy relate to each other. The observed network of organizations suggests that the sharing economy is an issue field. In addition, the core of this network shows the relational structure of an organizational field. Surprisingly, it is not an organizational field of the sharing economy. Instead, it is a field of organizations heavily engaged in proselytizing new organizational forms that will change other fields. What the authors observed is a new field configuration – the authors call it a disruptive field – that is, less inward-oriented than other fields but much more engaged in changing other fields’ structures and dynamics. With these insights, the authors contribute to institutional research on field configuration and shed light on the phenomenon of the sharing economy and its potential development.

This chapter investigates the cost of public debt for firms using a comprehensive sample consisting of 17,368 industrial bond issues from 1970 to 2011. The empirical evidence shows that yield spreads for seasoned bond issues are significantly lower than those for initial bond issues. This seasoning effect is robust across different sample periods, subsamples, and model specifications. On average, the yield spreads for seasoned bond issues are around 50 bps lower than those for initial bond issues. This difference cannot be explained by other bond and firm characteristics. The seasoning effect is more pronounced for firms with higher levels of uncertainty, lower information disclosure quality, and longer time intervals between the first and subsequent issues. Our empirical findings provide supportive evidence for the extant theories that aim to rationalize the information role in determining the cost of capital.

Research on the link between tourism and politics still remains relatively underdeveloped and more so when one considers the link between this phenomenon and the study of elections or psephology. This is despite the importance of elections to the democratic process and to considerations of the distribution of scarce resources particularly in countries heavily dependent on tourism. This chapter seeks to address this lacuna in scholarship through a theoretical explication of the nature of political issues and voter response. Applied to the development of a possible research agenda, this would aid in exploring the salience of tourism within electoral agendas from a relational perspective.

Over the last years, and under the umbrella of the “sharing economy,” various new social practices and novel business models have been established worldwide. Such practices and models are perceived both as opportunity and challenge for existing (urban) public governance regimes. It is in this sense that the sharing economy has become a contested issue and regularly provokes bold governance responses. However, local governing authorities first need to interpret, negotiate, and establish what exactly is “at issue” in order to (re-)act adequately. While such “politics of signification” are well-studied, for instance, in social movements and public media discourse, research on the concerted framing activities of public administrations as well as on the strategic work that sets the stage for public policy-making is relatively sparse – and entirely lacking for the context of the sharing economy. In this chapter, the authors look behind the scenes of the policy-making in the City of Vienna, Austria. The empirical findings unearth six distinct mechanisms –“delimiting,” “negotiating,” “detailing,” “linking,” “justifying,” and “situating” – that are strategically applied to shape the “Viennese way” of governing the sharing economy. This research develops an in-depth understanding of what the authors conceptually dub “strategic issue work”: the manifold efforts that lead to, and underlie, in this case, the policy-making of a local government when it tries to come to terms with the governance challenges of the sharing economy.

An issue and event were tracked for 90 days on Twitter, cable television, and large newspapers. The mortgage and housing crisis was an ongoing issue, and the BP oil spill was an ongoing event. As expected, the results suggest media as a predictor of Twitter for the two issue agendas studied. However, this study shows that the agenda-setting effects on Twitter are not equal in regard to issues and events. The agenda-setting effect of the media appeared to be stronger for the issue observed here. Moreover, initial evidence is provided that agendas for the ongoing events were more volatile than ongoing issues. For ongoing events, it appears that agendas are most reflective of the real-world cues that initiate them. This suggests that when real-world cues are largely absent, the media are less salient, and the agenda is more stable and ongoing. Finally, increased temporality appears to better reveal agenda-setting effects for events. Relaxed temporal measures appear to reveal the agenda-setting effect of ongoing issues more effectively. Events are not all equal; neither are issues. As such, the media and Twitter behave differently. This distinction has not yet been made in the literature.