The Roots of Modern White-Collar Crime: Does the Modern Form of White-Collar Crime have its Foundation in the Transition from a Society Dominated by Agriculture to One Dominated by Industry?

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate whether the process of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was a watershed for white-collar crime, such that this type of crime increased rapidly in connection with the industrialization process. The theoretical reasoning behind this notion is that the transition process promoted a mentality characterized by self-centered values and a culture of competitiveness, which together paved the way for fraud perpetrated at the expense of others. The data are from Statistic Sweden’s historical records and cover the period of 1864–1912. Since there is no way to measure all crimes that can be defined as white collar crime, we have used bankruptcy offences as an example of white collar crime. The results do not support the notion that the transition period from an agricultural to an industrial society showed an increase in bankruptcy offences. Instead, the results show that when fluctuations in the economy are taken into account, the industrialization process per se entailed less bankruptcy offences. On the other hand, other research using the case of Sweden has shown that it was first after World War II that bankruptcy offences increased rapidly. Our argument is that the transition process as a structural mechanism had a greater impact on bankruptcy offences when industrialized capitalism became advanced.

---

Society and the Second Age of Machines: Algorithms Versus Ethics

The term “Second Machine Age” was used by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book of the same name as an indication of the impact of AI technology on people, society, and the economy. The term seeks to analyse the age we actually live in, its hidden patterns, which jobs and fields of study have a perspective, and which do not. It is about the second industrial revolution that is going on right now, and it changes the world no less radically than the first one, driven by the steam locomotive. Exponential growth of digital technologies, digitization of everything and recombinant innovation is a driving engine and fuel of the Second Machine Age. However, the ethical issues of this change remain unaddressed. Artificial intelligence is currently being dealt with by a great many scientists and philosophers who ask many questions. The most important questions are whether the machines can think, whether we will give them the copyright, which the animals do not have until now, and the question whether AI can has its own ethics. The study focuses on these issues, and uses concrete examples to show our unpreparedness for these topics.     

Who catches the biotech train? Understanding diverging political responses to GMOs in Southeast Asia

Agricultural biotechnology in general and ‘genetically modified organisms’ in particular present, depending on whom you believe, either great opportunities for – or threats to – the future of farming and of food security in Southeast Asia. As a reflection of this cognitive rift, countries in the region have adopted divergent policies on genetically modified crops. Although both countries strove to become biotech pioneers in the 1990s, today the Philippines has emerged as the regional leader in this second Green Revolution, whereas Thailand effectively has rejected the new technology. How can we explain these divergent biotechnological trajectories? In this essay I argue that the answer is to be found in the impact of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which paved the way for mobilization and empowerment of opponents of agricultural biotechnology in Thailand, but not, or much less so, in the Philippines. In Thailand, genetically modified crops came increasingly to be perceived as incompatible with an ascendant and eventually hegemonic new development paradigm – sufficiency economy.     

Conflict Transformation and Civil Society: The Case of Nagorno-Karabakh

If Armenian and Azerbaijani negotiators ever agree on the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh, it will not necessarily resolve the long-running conflict, because any peace treaty would require the consent of the Karabakh Armenians, whose political representatives are currently excluded from peace negotiations. It is difficult to imagine the Karabakh Armenians consenting to such a treaty without a change in their perception of the Azerbaijanis. According to the theory of conflict transformation/peacebuilding, Nagorno-Karabakh’s civil society should be able to make a contribution to this change. Using the example of four Nagorno-Karabakh civil society organisations, this study shows how they positively or negatively influence conflict transformation.     

Die wissensbasierte Regierung der Bildung – Die Genese einer transnationalen Gouvernementalität in England und Schweden

Knowledge-based government of education constitutes a transnationally distributed practice of government that appears in various forms in different countries. The article defines government in accordance with Michel Foucault as governmentality—a particular configuration of governmental practices and body of knowledge—and develops a heuristic framework to study the historical development of knowledge-based government in the form of a “genealogy of government”. Two historical and comparative case studies on England and Sweden reconstruct the historical processes that involved the emergence of two particular models of knowledge-based government of education and explain their particular local characteristics. On the empirical results obtained the paper outlines the phenomenal structure of knowledge-based government of education as transnational social order and displays a number of general dimensions, in which different types of knowledge-based government of education differ from each other.     

Copy Me Happy: The Metaphoric Expansion of Copyright in a Digital Society

The article uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyse how the concept of “copy” in copyright law is expanding in a digital society to cover more phenomena than originally intended. For this purpose, the legally accepted model for valuing media files in the case against The Pirate Bay (TPB) is used in the analysis. When four men behind TPB were convicted in the District Court of Stockholm, Sweden, on 17 April 2009, to many, it marked a victory over online piracy for the American and Swedish media corporations. The convicted men were jointly liable for the damages of roughly EUR 3.5 million. But how do you calculate damages of file sharing? For example, what is the value of a copy? The article uses a model for valuating files in monetary numbers, suggested by the American plaintiffs and sanctioned by the District Court in the case against the BitTorrent site TPB, in order to calculate the total value of an entire, and in this anonymous other, BitTorrent site. These calculated hypothetical figures are huge—EUR 53 billion—and grow click by click which, on its face, questions some of the key assumptions in the copy-by-copy valuation that are sprung from analogue conceptions of reality, and transferred into a digital context. This signals a (legal) conceptual expansion of the meaning of “copy” in copyright that does not seem to fit with how the phenomenon is conceptualised by the younger generation of media consumers.     

Implementing and Integrating Policies on Performance-Based Pay: Coordinating the “One-Employer Approach” in a Swedish Municipality

In Sweden, performance-based pay has gone furthest in the public sector. This development has placed demands on employers to have a transparent and salient salary review process with which to evaluate employees uniformly and fair – and to act in a unitary manner, as one employer. Pay policies aim to coordinate salary reviews in organizations. However, the transfer of policy to practice is not easy and research has shown a gap between intended and implemented policies. Drawing on a case study in a municipality, this article expands knowledge on policy transfer by exploring and describing how HR, unions, managers and employees perceive implementation and integration of the pay policies, and to what extent the municipality succeeds in a one-employer approach. The findings suggest that the municipality fails to act as one employer and that the units that are most successful in implementing the policy are those closer to top management.     

Protests against Welfare Retrenchment: Healthcare Restructuring in Sweden

The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.     

Y-chromosome STR haplotypes in males from Greenland

A total of 272 males from Greenland were typed for 11 Y-chromosome STRs DYS19, DYS385a/b, DYS389-I, DYS389-II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS437, DYS438 and DYS439 with the PowerPlex^® Y System (Promega). A total of 146 different haplotypes were observed and the haplotype diversity was 0.9887. The number of haplotypes seen once was 108 and the most common haplotype was observed in 12 males. A significant F_ST value was observed (F_ST = 0.012, P < 0.00001) when comparing the population of 15 locations in Greenland assigned to 7 groups. The significance could mainly be attributed to the subpopulation of males from Tasiilaq (East of Greenland). The R_ST value was not statistically significant (R_ST = 0.016, P = 0.15).