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Momentum is gaining among major corporations to use the shareholder value approach to planning. This approach enables management to test alternative strategies and select that combination of strategies that creates the most value for shareholders. The authors describe how microcomputer software designed by a company called Alcar can be used by managers to incorporate the shareholder value approach in their strategic planning process.

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

Soon after the Lehman crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) surprised its critics with a reconsideration of its research and advice on fiscal policy. The paper traces the influence that the Fund’s senior management and research elite has had on the recalibration of the IMF’s doctrine on fiscal policy. The findings suggest that overall there has been some selective incorporation of unorthodox ideas in the Fund’s fiscal doctrine, while the strong thesis that austerity has expansionary effects has been rejected. Indeed, the Fund’s new orthodoxy is concerned with the recessionary effects of fiscal consolidation and, more recently, endorses calls for a more progressive adjustment of the costs of fiscal sustainability. These changes notwithstanding, the IMF’s adaptive incremental transformation on fiscal policy issues falls short of a paradigm shift and is best conceived of as an important recalibration of the precrisis status quo.

In observing several Central and Eastern European Union countries facing systemic challenges to their dependent growth models, most notably Hungary and Poland, the resilience of foreign-dependent and export-led growth in Slovakia remains puzzling, especially in the context of relatively high levels of socioeconomic disintegration. Failing to identify the systemic distinctions of Slovakia's GM growth model against the backdrop of the broader political economy of the Visegrad region, this chapter seeks to explain the apparent differences through the politics of growth model approach, adjusted for the purposes of advanced peripheral economies. It is argued that an important explanans to the resilience of foreign-dependent growth in Slovakia can be traced back to the unexpected constellation of neoliberal forces governing in the early 2000s and their implementation of avant-garde neoliberal policies aimed at outbidding regional competitors in foreign investment attraction. Facing growing socioeconomic discontent and anticipating that national populists would assume power, the outgoing neoliberal government tied the hands of its successors by committing to a euro adoption strategy, which the subsequent administration was unable to reverse. Consequently, the lasting resilience of Slovakia's growth model lies in the interactions between a cross-class enduring domestic growth coalition with a trans-coalitional commitment to catering to the needs of transnational manufacturing capital on the one hand, and external constraints, most notably membership in the European Monetary Union (EMU), on the other.

In the year 1900 Koch expressed the view that human and bovine tuberculosis were distinct diseases, that the bacillus of bovine tuberculosis could not produce this disease in the human subject, and that the bacillus of human tuberculosis could not set it up in the bovine species. As is now well known. these conclusions have not received the slightest confirmation from other workers in the same field, and it may be said that the consensus of scientific opinion is now to the effect that the bacilli of human and bovine tuberculosis are identical—at any rate, so far as the effects attributed to them are concerned. The Royal Commission appointed in 1901, and consisting of the late Sir MICHAEL FOSTER, Drs. SIMS WOODHEAD, SIDNEY MARTIN, MACFADYEAN, and BOYCE, have issued a further interim report on their investigations. The first interim report was published in 1904, the conclusions stated in it being to the effect that the human and animal diseases were identical, and that no characteristics by which the one could be distinguished from the other had been discovered. The report now issued shows that these conclusions are confirmed by the results of a very large number of fresh experiments. The main conclusions set forth in the present report are as understated :—

This cross-sectional study (1) described the views and practices of a national U.S. sample of high school coaches on the education and training of team captains in leadership; and (2) examined if their views and practices differed as a function of leadership behavior and coaching efficacy. Results of 255 online surveys showed nearly 90% of coaches thought formal captain leadership development programs were beneficial; only 12% used such a program. Coaches with higher character-building and motivation efficacy more strongly endorsed the intentional education and training of their captains and perceived fewer barriers to this process. These findings encourage coaches, others working directly with scholastic athletes, and leadership educators more broadly to leverage and examine sport, including captaincy, as a valuable leadership development opportunity for youth.

On 26th February, 1995 much of the UK merchant banking group Barings was placed in administration following a failed attempt by the Bank of England to find a buyer in the wake of massive losses incurred on unauthorised trades. The group, however, was subsequently bought by the Dutch financial services group ING. While recognising that many parties contributed, directly or indirectly, to the collapse of Barings, this paper focuses on the role played by the Bank of England as the main UK supervisor of the Group. It draws upon the findings of the official enquiries conducted in both the UK (by the Board of Banking Supervision) and Singapore (on behalf of the Singapore Ministry of Finance).

In the “shareholder primacy” (SP) view of the modern corporation, shareholders are endowed with ownership rights over the corporation. This view stems from the property rights and agency theories of the business firm formulated by financial and business economists in the 1970s and 1980s, which subsequently fed into US corporate law debates. It relies on positive legal assumptions that have largely been debunked by legal scholars, and on normative economic ideas that are equally problematic. However, SP is still very influential – if not the dominant paradigm of corporate governance, especially in the United States. The goal of the present study is to come back to the theoretical debates around the foundations of the SP paradigm to seek to identify key ideational properties that may explain, in part, the resilience of such paradigm in policy, scholarship and business practice. In particular, this paper proposes that one important reason for the persistence of the SP ideology lies in the latter’s foundation on the radically contingent nature of shareholders’ claims over the corporation.