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This paper focuses on two examples of constitutional corruption in India where the constitution is used for questionable political reasons by the Bharatiya Janata Party under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The paper relies on public documents and media reports to analyse Prime Minister Modi's handling of the purchase of Rafale jet fighters from France and the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A which resulted in the division of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Constitutional and democratic norms were violated in both cases, but the Supreme Court did not find any irregularities in the sale of the Rafale jet fighters. The second case is under challenge in the Supreme Court. The analysis reveals how the Modi government has undermined democratic values and used constitutional provisions to pursue its partisan and ideological agenda.

The paper focuses attention on the often neglected topic of constitutional corruption in India.

This paper examines the decline of the largest working parliamentary democracy in India overtime, but accelerating since 2014 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Center (as the federal government is commonly known).

It is eclectic. Original constitution, along with commentaries, are studied. News outlets, government pronouncements, journal articles, and other media outlets — electronic and print — are also sourced.

The findings show how three important features in democracy — elections and their outcomes, control of information, and suppression of dissent are widely used to undermine constitutional democracy.

Democracy can be undermined without altering the Constitution itself. It also explains the irony of Modi’s popularity, given the undemocratic practices. As he may continue in office for some time to come, commanding a log-rolling majority, the need of the hour is a united, constructive and effective opposition to ensure a healthy working democracy.

The CoViD-19 pandemic has brought about a panoply of institutional challenges both domestically and in the international arena. Classical constitutional theory thereby underwent a reinvention by the executive for the sake of speedy policy action and to the detriment of institutional control while favouring authoritarian forms of governance. This paper concerns itself with institutional responses to such developments, placing emphasis on the role of the judiciary and people*s in contesting emergency decrees and other executive orders, especially where fundamental rights are infringed upon. The paper aims to explore the difficulties arising with exerting absolute executive powers during the health crisis, the respective role assumed by constitutional courts and the impact of the new governance paradigm on forms of public contestation, also as a means of quasi institutional control.

Indeed, the right to health may be translated into political discourse and become foundational to security and public interest paradigms. This may result in a shrinking public space given the constraints to the freedom of movement. In the name of public safety, the (collective) right to assembly, expression and protest have been submitted to major limitations in that regard.

Ultimately, this re-opens debates on the meaning of absolute rights and contextualities of derogations, as well as the reconcilability of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights. It also exposes social inequalities, social justice dimensions and vulnerabilities, often exacerbated by the health crisis; migrant rights demonstrably face particularly severe and intersectional forms of violations.

Particular values lie with the interdisciplinary approach embraced in this paper; the authors draw on a variety of social sciences disciplines to shed light on this very current issue. Both theoretical and empirical methods are used and combined here, making sense of the underlying logic of virus governance and its impacts on fundamental rights.

Rights and duties are involved in every area of business and markets, and society and governments. Most often, rights and duties involve serious ethical and moral issues of conflict. A good theory of the ethics of rights and duties, obligations, and responsibilities will empower us to understand the impact of our actions on various stakeholders. Additionally, a deep understanding of rights and duties could help us to analyze better the impact of our executive actions on various stakeholders and, in particular, to fathom the damaging effects of rights and duties violated by the man-made current financial crisis when seen from an ethical and moral point of view. Our coverage on the ethics of corporate rights and duties will comprise of two parts: Part 1: The Nature of Corporate Business Rights and Duties, and Part 2: Respecting Corporate Rights and Duties. The chapter will feature Newcomb Wellesley Hohfeld’s framework of legal interests such as claims, privileges, power, and immunity and its various applications to contemporary market and corporate executive situations. We illustrate the theory of rights and duties using several cases from the current turbulent markets.

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual citizens to take more responsibility for their security.

A multimodal discursive approach drawing on multimodal narrative analysis of video clips and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is used to examine how the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated in video material published on Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency's (MSB’s) YouTube channel.

The study finds that the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated through an ongoing but evolving normalization of threat. The findings also show how responsibilization is legitimated in moralizing terms of individual contribution to society, which may indicate a return from neo-liberal values to more traditional Swedish collectivist values.

The study shows how communication around preparedness and responsibilization is discursively constructed and legitimated through multimodal features, while previous research has mainly focused on verbal or written communication.

The purpose of this paper is to review current knowledge, research and thinking about the difficulties facing public libraries offering internet access to their users in ensuring legally compliant and non-offensive use of this facility whilst still adhering to the professional value of freedom of access to information.

A range of recently published sources (1997-2013) relating to the technical and organisational measures used to manage public internet access primarily in public libraries in the UK with some limited international examples were reviewed and analysed. This work was undertaken as the underpinning research for an AHRC-funded project, MAIPLE (Managing Access to the internet in Public Libraries).

The provision of public internet access is a well-established component of the role of public libraries, but is seen as a potential problem due to the possibility of misuse, and it appears that simplistic technical solutions have disappointed. Legislation increases the need for more effective solutions that can provide a balance between the need for legal compliance, a welcoming environment for users, and the protection of key freedoms. A range of measures are being adopted worldwide in response to this dilemma.

Research exploring internet access in public libraries and its management in the UK is numerically small and much of it dates back to the start of the twenty-first century. This review presents a comprehensive analysis of the available literature and is of relevance to practitioners and academics in the fields of public librarianship.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

The study will inform relevant workplace gendered policies at the university and other academic institutions.

A cross -sectional study was conducted on all the Arabian Gulf University full-time employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2021. A questionnaire was sent to the employees requesting data that included sociodemographic data, living conditions, psychological status, social aspects, work productivity and satisfaction. The generalized anxiety disorder questionnaire (GAD-7) was used to screen for anxiety.

Gender disparity was noted in the increase of responsibilities at home and towards young children, and in stress and anxiety. Women’s reductions in peer (90.7%) and social (88%) interactions were higher than among males (81.8%, 73%, respectively). There was a narrow gender gap in work productivity and workload. More males reported that the university was concerned about its employees during COVID-19 and were satisfied with the measures taken. There was a gender disparity with respect to superiors periodically checking if the workload was manageable and discussing the mental health and well-being of the employees.

Future research directions may focus on how gender impacts the perception and response to crises in higher education in Arab countries.

This is one of the few studies in the region that examined the gendered psychosocial impact of COVID-19 and productivity in the workplace using a higher education institution as an example.

This paper presents a generic framework on port logistics development and its interaction with hinterland regions. Although earlier work on the topic (e.g. by Ferrari et al., 2006; Kuipers and Eenhuizen, 2004) offers valuable insights in the subject, it contains limitations in geographical applicability. Ports indeed face dissimilarities in, for instance, locational characteristics (a.o. distance from the sea and nautical accessibility) and hinterland connections. Only when a model for determining seaport-located logistics activities takes into account these issues of dissimilarity among ports, the framework could be applied to a variety of seaport ranges worldwide. In this paper we aim to provide a first version of such a framework. More particularly, by means of a survey conducted in the Port of Busan the shortcomings of traditional approaches are illustrated. We then propose a more encompassing model, which seems to explain fairly well the attractiveness of Busan in terms of logistics activities. This framework explicitly adds port and hinterland characteristics to the list of factors decisive in the choice of the location of logistics activities. Finally, we would like to remark that our research on this topic is still ongoing and results for surveys planned in New York and Antwerp will be reported in a later stage.

Social media platforms are a pervasive technology that continues to define the modern world. While social media has brought many benefits to society in terms of connection and content sharing, numerous concerns remain for the governance of social media platforms going forward, including (but not limited to) the spread of misinformation, hate speech and online surveillance. However, the voice of citizens and other non-experts is often missing from such conversations in information systems literature, which has led to an alleged gap between research and the everyday life of citizens.

The authors address this gap by presenting findings from 16 h of online dialog with 25 citizens on social media platform governance. The online dialog was undertaken as part of a worldwide consultation project called “We, the internet”, which sought to provide citizens with a voice on a range of topics such as “Digitalization and Me,” “My Data, Your Data, Our Data” and “A Strong Digital Public Sphere.” Five phases of thematic analysis were undertaken by the authors to code the corpus of qualitative data.

Drawing on the Theory of Communicative Action, the authors discuss three dialogical processes critical to citizen discourse: lifeworld reasoning, rationalization and moral action. The findings point toward citizens’ perspectives of current and future issues associated with social media platform governance, including concerns around the multiplicity of digital identities, consent for vulnerable groups and transparency in content moderation. The findings also reveal citizens’ rationalization of the dilemmas faced in addressing these issues going forward, including tensions such as digital accountability vs data privacy, protection vs inclusion and algorithmic censorship vs free speech.

Based on outcomes from this dialogical process, moral actions in the form of policy recommendations are proposed by citizens and for citizens. The authors find that tackling these dark sides of digitalization is something too important to be left to “Big Tech” and equally requires an understanding of citizens’ perspectives to ensure an informed and positive imprint for change.