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Business group affiliation seems to make a firm more opaque. The benefits of group affiliation (internal market transactions) and the negative aspects of group affiliation (agency problems of group control) both may make group firms more opaque than non-group firms. Using the opacity index developed by Anderson, Duru, and Reeb (2009), this paper reports that Korean group firms are more transparent than non-group firms after the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998) and this leads to better performance of group firms. The improved transparency results from disappeared internal market benefits and diminished agency problems. These results are robust after controlling for the size of internal markets of groups, industry diversification, the existence of group inside financial institutions, and endogeneity.

Governance and opacity issues have increased since the early 1990s and several governance indicators are introduced by international organizations and NGOs. The governance indicators have been used in various sectors, directly affecting a nation's political reputation. This study analyzes the context of governance and opacity in Argentina and Chile and assesses the relationship between the cultural pattern and the functioning of institutions. A first approximation to the analysis of Argentina and Chile seems to lead to the conclusion of the existence of homogeneity between them as a result of a similar background. However, differences in geography and history generate different societal norms, and functioning of institutions within them. Chile's geographical isolation and limited natural resources leads the country toward economic growth and political stability. By contrast, in Argentina, populist regimes undermine the foundations of its economy while its middle class struggles and loses public trust. The various factors interactively affect quality of public policies and governance and, consequently, are conducive to differences in the perceived and real levels of opacity between both countries. Is corruption a culture-specific issue? If yes, then, is governance a consequence of culture too? Therefore, it is important to interpret a context behind governance in order to establish appropriate anticorruption reform in practice. This chapter seeks to address some of these issues by means of a case study comparison between Argentina and Chile and contribute to the understanding of the context in which negotiations may occur when FDI and M&A deals take place.

We extend the literature on network perception by introducing a novel view of how this perception is structured. We propose the concept of Cognitive Aggregated Social Structures (CASS) as a framework to capture perceptions of opaque networks – that is, networks where relations are difficult to observe due to their features, their members, and the characteristics of the environment in which they operate. We argue that actors simplify their perception of opaque network structures via “chunking,” that is, by cognitively representing network ties as between categories of actors rather than between specific network members. We test the validity of the CASS construct and its predictive power by showing how these representations affect actors’ perceptions of relevant network outcomes. Using data from a major inter-organizational technology consortium, we show that perceived density among “chunks” in the knowledge transfer network is positively related to perceived consortium performance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the strategic management literature, highlighting potential contributions to strategic formulation and implementation, category emergence, industry evolution, and cognitive barriers to entry.

Over the past decade, legal recognition of trans, non-binary, and intersex individuals has occurred in a number of countries with diverse relationships to gender categorization and (settler) colonialism. This attention to trans and non-binary rights has translated into the addition of a third option for declaring gender: X. Heralded by some as a sign of progress and recognition of non-binary individuals by the state, the development of the X marker may also be interpreted as facilitating state regulation of gender-diverse individuals. Drawing on scholarship in trans studies and legal studies, this chapter critically examines the X marker as an intervention that works within and simultaneously resists state recognition of non-binary identities. By analyzing data gathered through semi-structured interviews with trans, non-binary, and genderqueer individuals who have obtained – or are in the process of electing – an X marker in legal documents, this chapter critically explores the tensions and complexities of the X and mobilizes the concept of opacity to demonstrate how individuals graft their own meanings onto this non-binary marker. While acknowledging the problematic use of identification documents as biopolitical instruments, this chapter asks if we can nonetheless use them as tools of resistance and radical self-determination to transgress the controlling power of the state.

Corruption is a phenomenon that is ubiquitous, but the extent and the form differ across countries. According to Transparency International, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in year 2001 varied from 0.4 to 9.9 (10 is completely corruption free). The average score for the 91 countries surveyed was 4.76 (with a standard deviation of 2.39). Why is there so much cross-country difference? Why are some countries virtually corruption free, but are others fraught with corruption?

This article estimates the loan spread equation taking into account the endogenous matching between banks and firms in the loan market. To overcome the endogeneity problem, I supplement the loan spread equation with a two-sided matching model and estimate them jointly. Bayesian inference is feasible using a Gibbs sampling algorithm that performs Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. I find that medium-sized banks and firms tend to be the most attractive partners, and that liquidity is also a consideration in choosing partners. Furthermore, banks with higher monitoring ability charge higher spreads, and firms that are more leveraged or less liquid are charged higher spreads.

Purpose – During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian jurisdictions have varied in terms of their reporting of COVID-19 cases among prisoners and prison staff. Engaging with literatures on the policing of criminological knowledge and prison opacity, this chapter examines how multiple approaches to newsmaking criminology including blog posts, op-ed writing, report publishing, and expert commentary can challenge state secrecy in ways that help generate proactive disclosure of additional information about the impact and management of the coronavirus behind prison walls.

Methodology/Approach – The authors explore how “flooding the zone” of public debates on pandemic management with the limited, incomplete data made available by authorities works as a knowledge mobilization and research strategy.

Findings – The analysis in this study reveals how a newsmaking criminology approach can help researchers access previously unpublished information from Canadian prison authorities that is crucial to understanding prison policy, practice, and outcomes related to COVID-19.

Originality/Value – This chapter highlights the value of newsmaking criminology as a means of communicating and mobilizing criminological knowledge, as well as generating data in the service of emancipatory research and advocacy.

In this paper I argue that the liberal problem of religion, which defines religion in terms of dogmatism or opaque justifications based on ‘revealed truth’, needs to be rethought as part of a broader problem of dialogue, which does not define religion as uniquely problematic.

Habermas argues for religious positions to be translated into ‘generally accessible language’ to incorporate religious citizens into democratic dialogue and resist the domination of instrumental rationality by enhancing ‘solidarity’. I contrast this with Rowan Williams’ and Gadamer’s work.

Williams conceptualises religion in terms of recognising the finitude of our being, rather than dogmatism or opacity. This recognition, he argues, allows people to transcend the ‘imaginative bereavement’ of seeing others as means. Using Williams, I argue that Habermas misdefines religion, and reinforces the domination of instrumental rationality by treating religion as a means. I then use Gadamer to argue that the points Williams makes about religion can apply to secular positions too by recognising them as traditions subject to finitude.

This is original because it argues that the liberal problem of religion misdefines both religion and secular positions, by not recognising that both are traditions defined by finitude. To reach, dialogically, a ‘fusion of horizons’, where religious and secular people are understood non-instrumentally in their own terms of reference, will take time and not trade on immediately manifest – ‘generally accessible’ – meanings.

This chapter examines the 1999 trial of Aaron McKinney for the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming whose death propelled forward an incipient movement to legislate against hate crimes. It explores the competing ways in which Aaron McKinney was conjured as a legal persona, defined through the opposing lenses of gay panic and of homophobic hate. It situates those personae in conflicting narratives of criminal culpability emerging out of indeterminate legal doctrines and definitions (the unwritten law; the meaning of ‘malice’), and argues that in conjuring them, adversarial criminal trials necessarily destabilise the ‘default legal person’. In doing so, trials performatively reconstruct the past in ways that both mark and mask a past events. In the McKinney case, contests over his culpability emerged against a backdrop of loss, both epistemological and affective, generating a projective reckoning with Shepard’s death in ways that enabled a politically transformational mourning process.

This chapter contributes to the continuous debate on the effects of public information. The debate initiated with Morris and Shin (2002) who showed that heightening the precision of public information can be detrimental to welfare in a beauty contest framework, because when agents have both private and public information, they may overreact to the public information since it acts as a focal point. If the private agents overreact to public information, then a policy of limited transparency may be warranted. Some researchers suggest partial announcement (limited publicity), others propose to disseminate the public information privately to each agent (limited precision) with some idiosyncratic noise in order to reduce overreaction. Those chapter, however, miss the following fact; they don’t take into account the interaction between private sector and the central bank. We extend those studies by setting the framework as a two-player monetary policy game between the central bank and the private sector by allowing explicitly for a central bank to be one of the many contributors of the public signal. We show (1) how introducing a certain degree of opacity affects both players and determines the conditions under which an intermediate transparent strategy improves the outcome of the private sector, as well as of the central bank. We find that reducing transparency doesn’t affect the two players in the same way. (2) It turns out that respective players’ losses are strictly identical when the central bank implements the optimal degree of transparency or the optimal degree of publicity. We establish then an equivalence relationship in terms of effects between publicity and transparency for both actors.