The impact of online media on stakeholder engagement and the governance of corporations

Online tools such as social media provide new opportunities for citizens and stakeholder groups to be informed, identify common interests, express and share opinions and demands, organize, and coordinate interventions. Therefore, the Internet could be expected to increase stakeholder engagement in corporate affairs and facilitate good governance. In order to provide an overview of current findings on the impact of online media on governance and stakeholder engagement, we conduct a systematic literature review. Our analysis reveals five topical categories of inquiry. We analyze studies from the field of business participation and find a strong bias towards consumer engagement and marketing issues. Only few studies are found to critically explore the effect of online media on power and value distribution between corporations and stakeholders. We then turn to the more established field of political and civic participation in order to further analyze antecedents, forms, and outcomes of online engagement in civic affairs, and derive a framework for future research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interventionism as Practice: On ‘Ordinary Transgressions’ and their Routinization

In this article, the aim is to bridge the gap in the international relations (IR) literature on contemporary interventionism between a strand of research mainly focusing on the concepts of intervention, sovereignty and their meanings, and a strand more interested in the particular practices bound up with the phenomenon described as ‘intervention'. This is done by exploring how the literature on the so-called ‘practice-turn' might allow light to be shed on both dimensions. Such an approach might prove fruitful provided attention is paid both to the material and discursive practices of interventionism; both to the transgressive practices constitutive of interventionism and their routinization. Finally, this piece also introduces each of this special section's contributions by showing how they illustrate and expand on the different problématiques here outlined.     

Sentencing private benefits in takeover contest

We present a model of profit diversion into a takeover environment. The model incorporates a legal environment characterized by a probability of being convicted, a monetary sanction (ex-ante protection) and the costs of administrating the takeover (ex-post protection). We show that the extraction of private benefits is reduced by the existence of such a legal environment, which is consistent with a number of empirical studies. It also predicts that legal environment can conduct the bidder to acquire more than 50% of the share due to the impact of the final holding of the bidder on the fine. The paper contributes to the current debate on regulation of white-collar crime. It highlights the trade-off between the ex-post profit diversion and minority protection, and the ex-ante probability of efficient takeovers. But, considering simultaneously two tools of protection, the ex-ante and the ex-post ones, which do not have the same impact, we derive some guidelines in order to analyze the current trend of the US and the EU laws.     

Social structure of the Jewish quarter in Vienna during the liberal era (1850–1900)

The article examines the nature of residential and coresidential patterns in the second half of the 19th century in a district of Vienna known as Leopoldstadt, which had a large Jewish population. Analysis of a database from this district, paying attention to occupation and class variables, suggests that the Jewish population therein was more mixed than traditional interpretations suggest, and that the concentration of Jews there can plausibly be explained mainly by reference to residential choices made by Jews to live near an economic infrastructure that catered to their religious and cultural needs. The patterns identified in the data suggest further that in interpreting the residential patterns of the city it is necessary to conceptualize the problem as one of interaction between religion, economics, and residential choice.