Labour protest and industrial peace: Russian steelworkers’ encounters with economic reforms and unravelling social protections

Abstract

This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle. Political and technocratic elites were hubristically detached from the process of financial innovation as it took the form of ‘bricolage’, which put finance beyond technical control or management. The paper raises fundamental questions about the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance.     

The Swiss business elite (1980–2000): how the changing composition of the elite explains the decline of the Swiss company network

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the decline of the Swiss corporate network between 1980 and 2000. We address the theoretical and methodological challenge of this transformation by the use of a combination of network analysis and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Based on a sample of top managers of the 110 largest Swiss companies in 1980 and 2000 we show that, beyond an adjustment to structural pressure, an explanation of the decline of the network has to include the strategies of the fractions of the business elites. We reveal that three factors contribute crucially to the decline of the Swiss corporate network: the managerialization of industrial leaders, the marginalization of law degree holders and the influx of hardly connected foreign managers.     

Shareholder value in an adverse environment: the German case

The German political economy has often been cited as a classical case of non-shareholder value orientation. Its productionist, long-term, consensus orientation has often been contrasted with the 'Anglo-Saxon approach'. The influence of shareholders who press for shareholder value and the importance of the equity market have traditionally been low. But there are signs of change. In this article we describe some of these changes and try to assess the dynamics of this change process. First we show that the limited role of the equity market for company financing and for private household savings still provides a very narrow base for a shareholder value economy in Germany. The central pillars of the German system of corporate governance - the dominating role of banks, the system of co-determination and the company centred management system - are not crumbling. Change in the direction of shareholder value is therefore limited.     

Political Quid Pro Quo Agreements: An Experimental Study

We experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence. In the game, one special interest (i.e., a corporate firm) has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates. The success of the investment depends on whether or not the candidates are willing and able to collude on low‐tax policies that do not harm their relative chances in the elections. In the experiment, successful political influence never materializes when the firm and candidates interact just once. By contrast, it yields substantially lower redistribution in about 40% of societies with finitely repeated encounters. However, investments are not always profitable, and profit sharing between the firm and candidates depends on prominent equity norms. Our experimental results shed new light on the complex process of buying political influence in everyday politics and help explain why only relatively few firms do actually attempt to influence policymaking.     

Procedure over substance? CETA and the political economy of subsidiarity

ABSTRACT

Competing notions of subsidiarity can help to understand the intricacies of new types of trade deals as concluded between Canada and the European Union. From this perspective the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) balances two fundamentally different models of economic distribution and decision making authority either giving priority to private actors and their domestic communities or to political institutions aiming for a social embedding within global markets. Examining CETA as an unusual compromise in international regulatory cooperation, this article focuses on the settlement of highly contentious issues through complex procedural innovation. While this eventually made a final agreement between trading partners with two different polities possible, it could not settle widely diverging assessments about the long-term economic effects of the new deal. As a consequence, and to build bridges between distinct spaces of subsidiarity, the final agreement represents a flexible and open-ended approach to future trade relations.     

Unusual findings in a death caused by a car fire

Witnesses detected a burning car in the parking lot next to a discotheque in the early morning hours. After the fire had been extinguished, the charred body of the 23-year-old car owner was found in the driver's seat. The young man had been a guest of the discotheque the previous night and consumed plenty of alcoholic drinks. The traces left by the fire on the car suggested that the fire had started in the passenger compartment. At autopsy, greyish-brown discoloration and induration of the mucosa of the respiratory tract were found in addition to massive aspiration of soot and signs of soot swallowing. The macroscopic and histological findings pointed to a chemical burn of the airways probably caused by chlorine gases developing when the covering of the passenger compartment was burning. Chemical burns due to inhalation, aspiration and swallowing of soot are all signs of vitality, so that a smoldering fire must have gone on for a while inside the car with the windows closed. The most probable cause of the fire is that clothing or textile material in the car was set on fire by a burning cigarette.     

Fatal chest injury from a shotgun slug: homicide, accident or suicide?

A 78-year-old hunter was found dead beside his raised hide with a gunshot wound to his chest. In the present case, the reconstruction of the shooting event revealed an accident. Disregarding all safety rules, the hunter had placed his superposed rifle-shotgun on the chair and pulled the barrels of the cocked gun towards his body. One of the triggers interlocked with the button of a camping chair's cushion and a shot was fired. Furthermore the morphology of wounds from shotgun slugs is discussed on the basis of the autopsy findngs.     

Extensive and mutilating craniofacial trauma involving defleshing and decapitation: unusual features of fatal dog attacks in the young

Four cases of fatal dog attacks are reported in 3 children aged 6, 10, and 11 years and in an infant aged 3 weeks. The cases were all characterized by extensive and mutilative stripping of soft tissues from the face and scalp, progressing to decapitation in the infant. The attacks were highly focused, involving 2 dogs in all but 1 case, with the area of trauma localized to the craniofacial region. The injuries resembled those found after postmortem animal depredation. The involvement of more than 1 dog may account for the severity of the injuries due to "pack" behavior. Deaths were due to exsanguination, air embolism, and decapitation. Necropsy examination of the attacking dogs revealed tissues from the victims in 2 of the animals' stomachs. These cases demonstrate the vulnerability of infants and young children to fatal dog attacks, with an unusual concentration of severe injuries to the head regions. Necropsy of the canine assailant, with collaboration between pathologists and veterinarians, is an important part of such investigations as it may provide information helping to establish the identity and ownership of the animal, along with trace evidence confirming that the dog was involved in the attack.     

Origin assignment of unidentified corpses by use of stable isotope ratios of light (bio-) and heavy (geo-) elements--a case report

An unknown male body was found near an expressway in Germany. As different criminalistic and forensic methods (e.g. tooth status, fingerprint or DNA-analysis) could not help to identify the person, multielement stable isotope investigations were applied. The combined analysis of stable isotope ratios of light (H, C, N) and heavy elements (Pb, Sr) on the man's body tissues supported to assign him to Romania. The case report demonstrates an application of multielement-isotope analysis in the forensic fields and its potential.