Family-owned,limited close corporations and protection of ownership

Protected ownership and freedom of contracts are two basic parts of the institutional framework of successful countries according to Douglass North, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1993. The incentives to make long-term investments are strengthened if ownership rights are protected and freedom of contracts is a basic element in the process of efficient allocation of scarce resources. An important engine in prosperous societies is the family firm. Most companies in these societies can be classified as family firms and a major part of GDP is produced by family businesses. Consequently, how ownership is protected in family firms is an important issue.Three important factors of private ownership of property are the rights to determine use of owned assets, the return generated from them and to transfer the assets at mutually agreeable terms to a new owner(s).The incentives of a founder entrepreneur to put efforts into the establishment of a firm are determined by all the three factors. We will here pay special attention to the third factor, transfer of the ownership of the firm. The founder often places contractual restrictions on such transfers to ensure that the structure of ownership is stable and that the firm stays in the family. The possibility to do so is part of the freedom of contracts and is associated with the extent of ownership held as well as the incentives to invest in new businesses.This paper is primarily about how protection of family ownership can be achieved from a legal point of view and discusses the reasons to enforce these legal relationships in the future for second, third, fourth etc. generations of family owners.     

The legal file

In this essay I examine the criminal defense file. I argue that being a largely neglected “object” of the legal field, upon a close examination, the file discloses its intriguing materiality as what is predicated on the structure of the fold that allows for the objective, virtual, and narrative spheres to overlap in a specific act-object, which, with Gilles Deleuze, I call objectile. A subsequent phenomenological analysis of the legal file as objectile shows how its constitutive features help the attorney shape ordinary matters into plentiful matters, turning the file into a locally designed sign system. Once exposed, this system reveals its relations to the legal system at large, with individual activities, institutional practices, and legal procedures all being a part of a complex manifold that is law.     

Zum Regelungsumfang des Art 16 Z 2 LGVÜ/Art 22 Z 2 EuGVVO

Klagen gegen einen internationalen Sportverband, die auf Feststellung der Unwirksamkeit einer Sperre eines bei einem nationalen Sportverband besch?ftigten Trainers von Wettbewerben dieses Sportverbandes und auf Unterlassung von Handlungen, die eine Akkreditierung verhindern bzw erschweren, gerichtet sind, unterliegen der ausschlie?lichen inl?ndischen Gerichtsbarkeit des Sitzstaates; eine Verbindung solcher Klagen mit einer gegen den nationalen Verband gerichteten gleichartigen Klage ist daher unzul?ssig. – Eine damit zusammenh?ngende Schadenersatzklage gegen den internationalen Verband steht auch nicht in dem von Art 6 Nr 1 LGVü geforderten Zusammenhang mit einer Klage gegen den nationalen Verband wegen Aufl?sung des Trainervertrages aufgrund der Sperre.     

Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being "appropriate." We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.     

Sustaining Labor‐Environmental Coalitions: Banana Allies in Costa Rica

What is required for sustaining an alliance between union and environmental activists? Applying grounded theory to a case study in the Costa Rican banana sector, this article reveals five historical phases. First, unions and environmentalists identify common opportunity structures for joint action. Second, a preexisting network becomes a resource for mobilization. Third, the new coalition engages in communicative action that leads to shared identity and cultural framing and a foundation for handling exogenous global forces. Market policy changes in the fourth phase stimulate a transnational activist network and framing linkages. Dramatic supply disruptions in the fifth precipitate autonomous organizational approaches that require reframing, identity extension, and flexibility. This study argues that the Costa Rican case can be generalized to other labor‐environmental coalitions if such alliances create simple, open structures that agilely adapt to external opportunity structures and expand frames that encourage collaborative autonomy and dualistic collective definitions.     

Using the state to change society: The example of ‘domestic violence’

North American research on the policing of ‘domestic violence’ has been very influential among policy makers in Great Britain. In particular, research which purports to verify the deterrence value of arrest has prompted the establishment of over thirty domestic violence units in London and similar initiatives elsewhere in Britain. The paper will outline the nature of the traditional police response to ‘family violence’ in London and the nature of the experimental innovations. Changes in police practice with regard to this type of violence will be put in the context of the organizational constraints and possibilities of policing. Finally, changing police responses to domestic violence will be evaluated in terms of the debate over the possibility of using the state or its organs to achieve social change.